


The Beautiful City

by musamihi



Category: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Genre: Autumn, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, New York City, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-27 14:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8405824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: After Mike's death, Llewyn begins to see his ghost.  Mike was, in life, his very dear friend - but in death ... well, Llewyn's not so sure.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).



> I adore this film, and I've been wanting to write something for it for ages - I saw your prompt, and I couldn't resist. I hope you enjoy!

The city is louder, in the fall. The clouds on grey days bear down on everything like a pressed tin ceiling in an old bar, bouncing sirens and car horns and the subterranean roar of trains every which way; they strike the close-drawn faces of buildings in the Village, and sweep up the sides of midtown monstrosities only to be cast right back down to earth. Nothing gets in - nothing gets out. New York is a prison of sound.

One slick, spitting afternoon, among the raucous slap of shoe leather and wet leaves, and the doped-up shouting of a street preacher, Llewyn distinguishes - just for a moment - a strong, driving, joyful voice. He knows it, even in the fraction of an instant before it slips away from him again, flitting up into the ragged half-naked oaks that sag over Tompkins Square Park. He stops and lets the din of it all wash around him - and then a deafening battery of pigeons obliterates everything for three long seconds, even the sun. When they've passed he finds himself staring up at the stone pediment over the temperance fountain, which says to him, in big block letters, _FAITH_ , like he's some kind of moron. The voice is gone. He walks on, knowing it's like they always say: _it's all in your head._

But later, sitting in a drafty corner of a bar with no microphone on a stool with two and a half legs, he knows that's bullshit. Like the voice coming out of him now, it's a cheap distraction from the truth. _That music wasn't in your head - that shit's never been in_ you _at all._

* * *

He's trying to sleep on a couch that doesn't quite deserve the name, in his friend's two-room dive down at the butt end of 2nd Avenue. It's a basement, with half-windows slashed up near the ceiling like holes in a shoebox. The pipes and glass trays and bottles tremble on the coffee table as though possessed every time the train clatters by below. It might wake him, he thinks, the rumbling from underneath the earth, the way everything in the room rattles and skitters across some surface like it's dead-set on tossing itself over the edge - it might wake him, if he could get to sleep in the first place. It's just the city, alive and undead, animated but automated. But fuck, is it _loud_.

He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, Mike is there - sitting cross-legged on the floor, on top of the pile of Llewyn's coat.

"Holy shit." Llewyn sits upright, wedging an elbow into the course upholstery of the cushion he's shoved under his neck. It isn't Mike; it's a shadow of him, pale and glowing, something he would call a _ghost_ if he saw it in a movie. He finds himself reluctant to make that leap, though. Because he isn't afraid.

Mike's lips are moving, forming long, slow words in the deliberate cadence of a song. But there's nothing to hear - he has no voice, as close as Llewyn leans, as intently as he strives to listen. Llewyn crosses his legs underneath himself and tries to sit up straight, like Mike's dim reflection in some deeply unkind mirror. There's something perfect about him, in this gentle, tranquil, silent form, something too smooth and polished. It makes Llewyn feel unwieldy - coarse - unshaven and unshowered, a man whose shoes have been left out to dry for too many nights without ever quite getting there. "I can't hear you," he says, a little too loud and a little too slow, like he's talking to a tourist.

Mike keeps on singing, without making a sound.

So Llewyn sits there, slouching slowly back, watching him as the minutes tick away. "You mind hitting the lights?" he asks, once, to try to get Mike to look at him - to look at _him_ , not the spot on the wall he's chosen for his thousand-yard stare. There's no reply; no response. Soon Llewyn's lying there the way he always used to, the gently wry expression on his face implying a resignation to the company he's sharing, the flicker of a smile in the corner of his mouth the only hint that, perhaps, keeping Mike in the periphery of his vision is a comfort to him. He doesn't hear the train, the next time it crashes past below.

He doesn't hear Mike, either, but just before he falls asleep, he realizes one of the words in the refrain his mouth's been forming, over and over.

_Hallelujah._

* * *

This is a dream, he knows, as the ship rolls under him, its engine thundering through the pitch black below-decks. But it wasn't, once - he has been here, on this miserable metal tub, tossing between craggy waves and a raining sky gone sideways, bound up in the kind of cold only sodden wool can really impose. He's slept in this hold ( _call it a cabin, if it makes you feel better_ ) with one arm curled beneath his head and woken up deaf in one ear. He's spent days feeling like he's still pressed against a violently vibrating metal plate, even after he goes ashore. His hearing always came back, but the first time it happened, he was sick with fear.

Well - fear, and the way his stomach hadn't been left alone in one place for half a week. He's not meant for the sea. The East River is enough of a crossing for him.

He climbs the slick steel stairs to main deck, and it's almost as dark there, but for the blinding white of the floodlights bleeding aft from the bow. If anything, they just make it harder to see. The air is fresh, though, and blessedly dry. He edges forward along the railing until he's on the dark side of those lights, and as far from the churning engine as he can get without diving overboard. He can hear the wind screaming at him on one side, but not the other. It's the weirdest feeling, this unbalanced disorientation, like everything's happening in two dimensions, life scrolling by without him across a television screen. He shuts his eyes and hums, monotone, like he's tuning a violin.

When he looks down into the water again, the chopping waves are lit from the bottom. There's a glow - a man's face, turned up to him from the deep, his lips moving slow and smooth and rhythmic. _Mike_. Llewyn leans forward, over the rail, because he can't hear what Mike's singing, and he turns his good ear to the crashing sea and then he's falling, tumbling head over heels through an impossible distance to drop into the black ocean. It's the Atlantic, it's the Jordan, it's Lethe, it's the Hudson. 

And beneath the surface, the sound carries beautifully. _Meet me in the city,_ that voice calls, ringing clear as crystal as the water curls into every part of him. If he breathes it in, will he be able to sing, too? _Over in Galilee._

Llewyn wakes up on the floor beside the couch, tangled in his coat. For a moment, he can't speak. Then he remembers: you have to inhale, first.

* * *

He can't stay - he grabs his coat and tugs on his clammy shoes and shoulders his way out into the night, leaving Mike's ghost cross-legged and unbearably serene in that basement. (He leaves his guitar, too: a nightmare is no reason to subject that thing to the cold and damp.) How many mornings, after Mike was suddenly _gone_ , did he wake up and expect to find the world with him still in it? It took him weeks for the first thought that formed in his mind upon regaining consciousness _not_ to be: _fuck, that's right, he's dead._ Having him back in any form should be a gift.

But when he thinks of that gentle white light, Mike's blank, fish-mouthing features done in silent flame - he tastes the river in his mouth. He shivers as the night air pools under his collar and creeps down his back like sweat. He walks faster - north. 

It's a few blocks later, on St. Mark's Place, that Mike appears, strolling out of a locked-up storefront. His hands are stuck deep in his pockets. His feet skim frictionless above the ground. The light he sheds touches nothing: everything around him is darkness. Llewyn stops, his heart dropping. Mike walks on.

 _Meet me in the city,_ that's how the song goes. _Meet me, meet me._

"What - I'm supposed to follow you?" Llewyn doesn't expect an answer - except the one he gets from some poor asshole curled up in a doorway, _son, I don't care what the fuck you do_ \- and he isn't disappointed. Mike's back is turned to him, and it stays that way. His form recedes. Llewyn knows in his gut he should let that light wink out. He shouldn't give in to this urge to run after him.

He does, anyway. Mike heads down into the subway at Astor Place, and Llewyn only takes his eyes off him to watch the stairs as he's running down, watching out for puddles. When he looks up, Mike is floating through the gates that lead to the platform. Llewyn fumbles in his coat pockets, but he doesn't have a token - he has no coins at all. So he hops the turnstile, not exactly a practiced motion for him. Mike's stopped at the edge of the platform, looking down into the rivers of muck and litter collected in the gutter of the tracks.

"If this is a reenactment," Llewyn mutters, easing up beside him to peer down into the mess, "I guess I should thank you for not making me chase you all the way uptown."

Mike's mouth isn't moving, not anymore. Llewyn sucks in a breath. "Why are you -"

Mike jumps. He disappears, falling right through the tracks like they're nothing - like they're merely the illusory surface of something much deeper. Llewyn's throat tightens, because they're _not_ , they're solid, this isn't the ocean, this isn't some staircase into the dank but habitable underbelly of the city, this is a solid barrier, and he can't follow - 

And with a rush of wind and a deafening screech and clang, the train barrels into the station on the opposite platform.

Llewyn stares at it, as it sits there thrumming in place; he watches his own gaping face in the scratched and spattered glass of the window, yellowed and old in the train's harsh interior lighting. _What the fuck,_ he mouths, and the man in that reflection makes not a sound. The train screams out of the station again, leaving him behind. Mike doesn't reappear.

He looks down at the empty tracks at his feet - and slowly turns his face to the dark tunnel beyond the platform. _What,_ he thinks, and he's asking this time, really hoping for a sign, _you want me to follow you?_

He jumps down onto the tracks, and instantly finds himself ankle-deep in rain water and food wrappers and god knows what else. Honestly - even the river would be cleaner. The tunnel's still dark, the tracks still motionless and silent, but he starts in the direction he knows the train will be coming in from. If he sees Mike, he tells himself - if he sees Mike, he'll stay the course.

A light appears. It's slow, weak, bobbing - not a train, but not Mike, either, the way it touches the dripping walls and the disgusting road of garbage before it. Llewyn squints, but it's not until the light is just a few feet away, and the illumination from the platform brings everything into view, that he can see: it's a man, with a coil of cable over one shoulder and an electric lantern in his hand, strapped into a hard hat. He's covered, head to toe, in white dust - it settles into the folds of his jacket, into the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, like fine snow. He sees Llewyn, and all he does is cough; the stuff goes everywhere.

"Construction," he shouts, and Llewyn recognizes the overmodulated voice of a man who's lived too long with one ear to something ragingly loud. "You want to kill yourself, you gotta get the downtown train."

And then he's gone, too; he slips through a gap in the beams at the side of the tunnel, and disappears.

"Thank you!" Llewyn calls after him, only tentatively sarcastic - feeling personally aggrieved by the subway's ability to scuttle his plans is nothing new, but if he's being perfectly fair: it's not like he paid. 

It echoes back to him, once, and then again, weaker, more distant, in a voice he hardly recognizes as his own: _thank you._

He stands there for a long time, in the dark, waiting for - something. A wind from the deep; a voice from the black. A light, somewhere, anywhere. Nothing comes.

So he walks back to the platform - he plants his hands on the concrete - and he starts to haul himself up.

**Author's Note:**

> Mike's song is _Oh, What a Beautiful City_ , which can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEbC6oWWZxE).


End file.
